About

About Me

Small Cheesy Bio

My name is René Richard, born and raised in Kapuskasing in Northern Ontario. My first exposure to video games came at a very young age. My parents owned a corner store at the time and we rented an NES. While it was not rented, we were allowed to play with. After many tantrums my parents decided we should get our own NES (good parenting) to avoid further disputes when someone would show up to rent the system.

I studied Electronics Engineering in Ottawa in the early 2000’s but I’ve always had a penchant for gaming electronics. My first project demonstration in school was how to modify SNES controllers for use on a PC. Later in school, we built a robot which was radio-controlled via an NES controller.

About db Electronics

db Electronics is a pass-time of mine, I run this little project out of my basement shop in Kapuskasing, Ontario. I have a full-time job outside of db Electronics as Network Administrator for a school board.

The Process

Every PCB I generate is a custom design; I used Protel 99SE in the past to design my schematics, libraries and PCBs but now I’ve fully switched to KiCad. All of my libraries are available on Github. I also do not use any external library components, every component is modeled in my PCB library – this is an old habit I got from my first job where we were not allowed to use external libraries.

PCB builds are outsourced to China unfortunately due to high North American costs for a similar service. I generally use Smart-Prototyping for PCB builds. Their service is rather quick and I’ve never experienced any issues with build quality or incompetent service.

The Shop

My workshop is a simple room in my basement; it is here where all the assembling and development take place. There are three stations total:

An assembly station (pictured to the right) where most hand-soldering takes place. This is also where I keep my multitude of parts bins, most filled with parts I will probably never use!

A development station running Linux Mint because I’m a strong believer that all my projects should be reproducible with nothing but free software.

A heavy duty station where I use power tools, hot-plate soldering, packaging, etc…

It’s hard to keep the shop organized – any engineer will attest to this. I’ve heard many times that, the messier your shop is, the smarter (and more eccentric) you are!